You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2007.
Since I work with recommender systems, I’d hardly be doing my job if I didn’t notice things like Google Reader’s new feed recommendations. From the description of how the recommender works on the Google help page (which is unfortunately not very specific):
Your recommendations list is automatically generated. It takes into account the feeds you’re already subscribed to, as well as information from your Web History, including your location. Aggregated across many users, this information can indicate which feeds are popular among people with similar interests. For instance, if a lot of people subscribe to feeds about both peanut butter and jelly, and you only subscribe to feeds about peanut butter, Reader will recommend that you try some jelly.
This sounds like they are using a hybrid recommender system. When you are recommending items (in this case feeds) to users, you can either consider the qualities of the items themselves (content-based) or the behavior of people similar to you (collaborative filtering). The Netflix Prize is a collaborative filtering case for the most part, though it is possible to add in some amount of content.
You Belong in London |
 A little old fashioned, and a little modern.A little traditional, and a little bit punk rock. A unique soul like you needs a city that offers everything. No wonder you and London will get along so well. |
This, via my friend Israel. I guess we both belong there. Let me know what your results are. I had no idea about the first question. I only recognized Versace so picked that.
I took the dogs to Frick Park this morning, something I hope to repeat as often as possible during the winter break. By the time we get home from work/school, it’s almost completely dark outside and we’re still a few weeks from the winter solstice. So the poor little devils don’t get to go to their favorite park during the week otherwise. I hear you asking, “How do you know it’s their favorite, crazy?” Well, they don’t whimper when they get close to other parks.
The Watering Hole
The Bug
The Bee
And yeah there’s no good reason here for it to be all old-timey except that I was bored. We didn’t actually go to the dog park area since there was a big puddle in there (and no dogs), so we stayed out in the public area. It’s technically illegal to have dogs off leash there, but it’s not enforced at this park. Dog people have taken it over. During the day, it’s extremely empty too, so that’s good. We were on our way out and I thought I was hot stuff because I had avoided letting Willow get wet and muddy. However, she managed to find a random puddle on a level area on a hillside. It’s freezing outside and the puddle is completely covered in ice. That didn’t stop her from cracking the ice, laying down in it and drinking to her heart’s content. Blerg.
Either the coolest or the stupidest programming language in the world, brainfuck was designed by Urban Müller in order to create the world’s smallest compiler of a Turing-complete programming language. Originally his compiler was 240 bytes in size, but he reportedly got it down to about 200 bytes. Others have gotten it below that. The language consists of only 8 operations, which I will go into after the jump.
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| Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters |
I sometimes forget John McCain is running for president. The guy came in second last go-round (2000) against W, but this time he just can’t seem to get his foot out of his mouth. CNN is reporting on a Florida poll that puts him in a distant third (tied with Fred-freakin-Thompson) to Giuliani’s fairly decisive first.
Time to drop out, buddy. Time to hang that crazy hat on the walls of Congress alongside John Kerry and Joe Lieberman. Yeah the media collects your soundbites when you beat on the empty drums you collectively call your heads, but no one is listening. You may now join the ranks of the Marginalized.
Semantics and Pragmatics is a new open-access, peer-reviewed journal focusing on the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. While the journal isn’t focused directly on computational methods, they expect to also publish material relevant to philosophers, psychologists and computer scientists. Hopefully it will be more than the occasional submission that is of interest to CS people. I’m looking forward to the first issue.
So I’ve mentioned Slumber Party before. They are a detroit girl band (femme doom rock) and are freakin awesome. Seriously, I can’t get enough. They are just brilliant to me. So anyhow, I saw they had a Christmas album with 2 unnamed songs. According to the website, it’s a limited edition of 50 hand made single CDs. Sure enough, the CD arrived wrapped up like a Christmas present and the CD looks hand-painted, but I can’t be sure. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
The first song on the CD was decent, but not really special in the way I look for from Slumber Party. The second song made the whole CD worth it. A quirky combination of spoken lyrics, a childrens choir, 50’s harmonies, and haunting female vocals — it’s my new favorite Christmas song.
I’ve seen Santa dogs and elf dogs. Frosty the Snowman dogs and Rudolf dogs. But this is a new one to me.
So still in York on the Thanksgiving holiday, doing stuff with Donna’s family. Today we ate dinner with her cousin Connie and son Dillon. They are cousins, but were really close growing up, so are more like sisters. So to Dillon we are Aunt Donna and Uncle Jason. He is crazy cute and strong like Bam-Bam. He’s also extremely durable. I’ve never seen a kid who gets a bigger kick out of falling down, being thrown in the air, and being tossed (from short distances) onto cushions.
I love puzzle games that really challenge your mind. Planarity is such a game. You are presented with several vertices connected by edges. The vertices are shuffled and many of the edges overlap. The goal is to move the vertices so that the edges are no longer intersecting. Simple enough, right? As you progress in level, the challenge increases. More and more vertices are added. After beating level 7, I was too tired to continue, but that has nothing to do with the game. Too much homework and insomnia. Anyhow, the game is really awesome and I strongly recommend checking it out for anyone who wants to exercise their brain.
I have a secret love affair with airships. Ok, maybe not so secret. They are in a word, awesome. I wish airships from movies like Stardust or games like Final Fantasy were a reality. I’ve always thought they would be the coolest machines ever built. I have a special place in my heart for complex machinery made out of wood, rope, and brass. This is the essence of steampunk technology to me.
So the Zeppelin may come back to San Francisco. Airship Ventures is a company that hopes to bring commercial airship tours to the US by fall of next year (the stress is on hope). The rides won’t be cheap — about $250-$500 a pop. Also these airships are more like blimps. They are built by Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik (Airship Technologies) in Germany. Already, they are used for tours around the world. There are a bunch of pictures on their website along with a set of draconian copyright rules that prevent me from posting one on my blog.
Fortunately, there is Flickr.
I’m not sure if anyone realized it, but Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas, is running for president. How do I know this? His first campaign ad. He has finally proposed doing what I’ve been saying do for years: unleash Chuck Norris on the world. Illegal aliens at the border? Walker Texas Ranger baby.
So this election, would you rather have Chuck Norris protecting America or space aliens? That’s what I thought. Vote Dennis Kucinich.
A couple months ago, I wrote about Richard Hogg dying. He was a professor at the University of Manchester who edited the Cambridge History of the English Language
Now, the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) has set up a scholarship in his honor. Early career scholars who are members of ISLE (membership can be applied for at the time of submission) are eligible. Early career means you either haven’t gotten your PhD yet or got it within the past two years. Masters and undergraduate applicants are acceptable, but the expected entrant is a PhD candidate/recent recipient. The paper may be on any research-related topic in English or English linguistics and will be judged on originality and the contribution of its results. The prize is £500 and the submission deadline is March 31, 2008.
You gotta hand it to a guy who drops all his money to pursue his dream. Even when that dream is a movie about a baked bean killing people with two dragon pistols. This was done by the lead animator of Matrix Reloaded (Jeff Lew) and looks like it might be amusing. Hard to say, though. At the very least, I like to see people working outside (or on the fringes) of the Hollywood superstructure. He was just the animator for Matrix Reloaded and the graphics were great despite the other problems the movie had. Personally I liked it, but I know a lot of people view it as an abomination.
The intertubes are full of quizzes. Magazines like Cosmo have thrived on them for years. “Are you a good lover?” Websites like Tickle pretty much consist of nothing else (and I haven’t bothered beyond the odd quiz someone sends me). Tons of Facebook apps like Flixster (movies) and Harry Potter rely on them heavily. One of my google alerts is for linguistics and I saw some random 14-year-old dude’s blog post about his perfect major according to this quiz. My results are below the jump.
So of course everyone with sense knows these quizzes are pretty much random. However, they also collect a vast amount of data. What they don’t collect (usually) is actual information about the people who take their quizzes. Imagine if at the end of a quiz there was a question or two about the actual truth of the thing the quiz is predicting. What kind of lover are you? Well just ask! If the result is similar to the quiz results, you can gauge how well your quiz is classifying people. It may not produce scientifically valid results but it does produce results that are better than nothing.
Look at that cute little dirty nose. Went to the dog park. Daedal was being good today, but Willow was being possessive with her frisbee and attacking any dog that got too close. Multiple dominations were required and it was hard to keep my cool, which doesn’t help. On the way out, we were throwing the frisbee and someone released their dog to go “play” with her. So the pit bull charges Willow down as she’s bringing back the frisbee and she snaps at it and they get into a scuffle. For one thing, damn pit bulls. For another, why does she insist on picking on dogs so much scarier? One of the dogs she was getting snappy with was a great dane three or four times her size. She’s a fierce little devil.
Australian shepherds are supposed to be good protectors. She’s so scrawny, it’s hard to believe she could be. Contrary to the name, Australian shepherds didn’t originate in Australia. They were bred from several different breeds in the western United States in the 1800’s. Originally, one of their ancestors probably came from Spain where Basque farmers used them with their livestock. During the landrushes of the 1800’s, many breeds were mixed in the American West. Dogs of UK and Spanish descent are believed to have contributed the most to the breed that came to be known as Australian Shepherds. The name seems to have come more from the fact that herding dogs were bred for specific landscapes in Australia and that practice was applied to this emerging breed. So Australian Shepherds are to Australia as Continental Breakfasts are to Europe.
I’m no expert here, so if I’m wrong, hopefully someone with more knowledge will fill in the gaps and/or correct bad info. As I understand it, there is a good deal of controversy.
So Monday is the launch of 23andMe, the baby of Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki. The idea is that you drop $999 and a cheek swab in the mail and they sequence your DNA. You can then see things like what sort of diseases you have the genes for, what things you might pass on to children, your ancestry (via mitochondrial DNA), and so on. It keeps track of all of this and lets you see what sort of odds you have of developing certain health problems. One example on their website is the Odds Calculator, which is fairly interesting. You can see side-by-side the odds of a person of your ethnicity developing a certain disease compared to the odds of someone who has the same gene as you developing it.
Many concerns arise here. For one, if employers, insurance providers, or the government were ever able to access this information, that would be a serious breach of privacy and could possibly be a real danger when it comes to finding employment or insurance. If you’re twice as likely to develop cancer as someone else in the next 10 years, if you could even find insurance, it would surely cost a lot more. Some libertarians might say this is only fair. The people who use the most resources should bear the burden. That seems like it violates one of the philosophical cornerstones of our country to me. All men were created equal. But if you were created “differently equal” and are “differently able” to cover the financial burden, you’ll live “differently shorter.”
But of course, 23andMe makes it a central point that your privacy is a top priority for them. It certainly would be interesting to know what you are liable to develop in old age. If there was anything you could do to prevent it now, wouldn’t that be helpful? Who can you trust?
Interestingly, Esther Dyson, daughter of physicist Freeman Dyson, sits on the board. Dyson is popular for her writings and commentaries on new technologies. So she sees this going someplace. I think it probably will too.
The Grand Unified Theory (GUT) has been sought after for years. Einstein died pursuing it. Many great minds have tried to tackle it and complicated theories and first steps abound. There are four forces in our universe: the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity. The Standard Model unifies the first three. The problem has been unifying these with gravity. String theory was proposed to account for gravity but so far it has been completely untestable. This, of course, invalidates it as a scientific theory. It has remained compelling to many physicists, though, in hopes of one day being able to test it. The goal of a GUT (or a theory of everything) is to reduce all of these forces to a standard set of equations.
At the moment, we have two theories which account for everything and no way to bring them together. The Standard Model and Einstein’s General relativitiy. Enter Garrett Lisi. He got his PhD from UC San Diego in 1999 and has since been unaffiliated with an academic department. He surfs and snowboards and basically goes around not knowing where he is going to stay next month or how he will pay for it.
E8 (right) is the key. It is a complicated mathematical construct that I don’t really understand from my glance at the wikipedia entry. As is typical in higher math, you have to understand 20 other things first and I’ve never even heard of Lie algebras. However, the layman’s breakdown is that it is an 8-dimensional pattern that encapsulates the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object which itself has 248 dimensions [source]. Make sense? Anyhow, apparently this thing was only well understood this year, despite being discovered over a hundred years ago.
So Garrett Lisi recognized that each of the 248 points in E8 correspond to the various elementary particles and forces in our universe. This left 20 points that had to be filled in with theoretical particles. So now all Garrett has to do is develop a set of experiments to test his theory. The Large Hadron Collider will go online next year and if string theory is correct, probably end the world. However, if Garrett is correct, we’ll all be alive in 2009.
This weekend will be the peak time for the Leonid meteor shower. It is so-named because the meteors originate from the section of the sky corresponding to the constellation Leo. The most locateable star in Leo is Regulus, which rises these days just after midnight on the eastern horizon. A little while later, Saturn rises behind it. Saturn and Regulus are both fairly bright so they make an easy pair to spot. The sky map below is from a perspective of Pittsburgh, PA at 1:51 am tonight (November 17, 2007). Peak time for the shower will be around 4am tonight and tomorrow night. [source]
Of course, you don’t have to find the constellation Leo in order to enjoy the Leonids. The comet Tempel-Tuttle leaves a trail of dust as it orbits the sun and occasionally we stray right into it. In 1833, the event was so huge people from Europe and North America took note of it. Estimates of the storm activity put it at over 200,000 meteors per hour! I dream of such a thing. It even led to the song “Stars Fell on Alabama.” Another big storm occurred in 1866 and again in 1966. Unfortunately, it looks like this year will be a modest viewing year, which puts the Leonids lower on the totem pole than the Perseids, which occur back in early August.
Viewing conditions for Pittsburgh look grim, which is typical of this time of year. This morning we had our first real snow. It had snowed a week or two ago briefly, but that was more of a snowy drizzle/wintry mix. Today there was actually accumulation on the dead leaves in the yard and on some cars. Nothing major yet.
After visiting my mother-in-law’s and over-indulging in her Pennsylvania-Dutch cooking (and thereby avoiding the guilt that accompanies not over-indulging), I often feel like this. [hat tip]
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| Image credit: Phillippe Bush, Department of the Environment |
This is very similar to one poor snake I saw a video of on YouTube a while back. You might not want to click play if you are faint of heart (below the jump).
I stumbled on this the other day. The game is called Crayon Physics and it’s pretty much what it sounds like. You can make a crayon drawing of simple shapes like squares and circles and curves. The objects you create begin obeying the laws of physics (gravity and Newton’s laws of motion mainly). So a square drawn in the air falls to the ground. A circle drawn on a slope begins to roll. The first version is pretty simple. On each level you have to move the ball to the star. You can drop things on the ball to get it to roll, you can set up obstacles, build bridges, etc. It’s ingenious.
The next version will hopefully roll out soon. No telling though since it’s a guy working in his spare time. But looks to be excruciatingly cool. Watch me play one level while trying to record it on my cell phone.
The second fantastic photo of Earth from space I’ve come across in as many days was taken by the Rosetta comet probe sent up by the European Space Agency (ESA). The Rosetta craft made big news recently when it was mistaken for an asteroid that was going to make a near-Earth pass. The Minor Planet Center failed to cross check the object against known probes and so sent out an alarm before realizing their mistake. Rosetta is using the Earth as a slingshot to propel it into the outer solar system (4.4 billion miles) to the Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. After that it will return to Earth for another gravitational slingshot.
Now here’s a great idea. StupidFilter is an open-source project with the goal of rooting out and destroying stupid comments in blogs, wikis, YouTube, flickr, and just about any place morons are allowed to voice their opinions. Pulling this off would allow me to read the comments on Flickr without wanting to rip my eyeballs out. No longer will I gag when I accidentally allow myself to glance at the comments on a YouTube video. Yes, the world will be a better place.
The best part will be the complaints by users who are no longer able to leave comments.
“Yo I tired like 333 tiems to comemt and can’t!!!111 watfxup?!?!”
Hat tip.
One day our grandchildren will look into the morning sky and see this and think, I wonder what it’s like to live there… This is the first high definition view of Earth rising over the moon. It was taken by the Kaguya spacecraft put in lunar orbit by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). [source]
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| Credit: JAXA/NHK |
Or Mrs. Ancient Brewer Woman?
One more reason to thank God for beer. Apparently, beer makers in Honduras 3000 years ago used cacao seeds to make their brew. One byproduct of that process ended up being a predecessor of modern chocolate, though it tasted nothing like what we’re used to nowadays. Traces of chocolate were found on pottery fragments dated to between 1100 and 800 B.C. I always wonder where certain foods come from. When you have to go through an involved process to make something, don’t you just have to stop and think, who the hell came up with this? It’s no surprise that the pursuit of the wonderful drink we mortals call beer led to similarly awesome discoveries.
There is a cool article today in New Scientist that describes an old cooling method with a bleeding edge application: a rover to Venus. Venus is a picture of the greenhouse effect gone wild. Average temperatures are about +260 degrees Celsius (500 degrees Fahrenheit). This is hot enough to melt lead and destroys most modern electronics. Previous rover attempts to Venus by the US and Russia lasted less than 2 hours. So if we are to put a rover on Venus for the kind of time we have spent on Mars, we’ll need to find a way to cool the onboard electronics long enough that they can operate well.
Enter two NASA boffins, Geofferey Landis and Kenneth Mellott. By applying a refrigeration technique invented by a clergyman nearly two centuries ago, they have found a way to keep a rover cool for about fifty Earth days (a Venutian day is 243 Earth days, about 19 days longer than its year!). The Stirling cooler (invented by Reverend Robert Stirling) works by compressing a gas with a piston. As it compresses, it gets hotter. The temperature is dissipated with a radiator (which would be placed on the back of the probe). As the gas expands, it gets cooler (causing the refrigeration effect). In order for this to work, the radiator must be hotter than the outside air.
Interestingly, the Stirling cooler is energy efficient and is being incorporated into some of the newer energy efficient refrigerator models. To power the cooler on the rover, they propose using a plutonium battery. This type of device is known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. As the radioactive material decays, it release heat, and this heat is converted into electricity. These batteries are common on satellites and in unmanned situations where a long duration power source is necessary and solar cells are not viable (the massive cloud cover on Venus prevents solar cells from being very effective, plus the atmosphere is very caustic and I think it would probably damage them).
Well, if there is somehow intelligent life on Venus, let’s hope they don’t confuse this rover for the first case of interplanetary terrorism.
Daedalus got his new winter coat. He just loves it. (He wouldn’t move from the spot where we placed him.)
I just attended a wedding yesterday and have been without Internet for way too long. Interestingly, my last post became wildly popular on both digg and stumbleupon. That post has more than doubled the total traffic of all time to my blog, bringing it to over 10k hits. As of the writing of this post, the post has gotten 4,060 hits today alone, about 550 yesterday and 990 Friday. Crazy. Thank you, whoever put up that sign. On a side note to anyone who might be wondering, CMU uses blue cannisters for recycling. There isn’t normally a cannister in that location and people were standing around it the past couple days before it, so anyone who passes through there on a regular basis would know not to use it. Some funny comments on the post and on digg.
Anyhow, at the wedding, the best man gave the traditional toast. The couple being married had dated for about 10 years, so it was a pretty special wedding to a lot of people. The best man made the point that, in marriage, it’s easy to fall in love with somebody, but a happy marriage comes from growing that love. As your love grows, you’ll look back and see your wedding day as the day you loved each other the least. He concluded with the following line (my paraphrase since I can’t remember exactly):
“May the best day of your past be the worst day of the rest of your life.”
It got a round of laughs, but it’s also a great way to put it.
There’s a food drive going on in the School of Computer Science at CMU right now. I came in yesterday and found this sign:
I think if I were running the food drive and found the container full of trash, I would have vomited the hot blood of righteous anger in a similar fashion.
Which will be the newest extraterrestrial body humans will set foot on? (Aside from the moon, of course.) According to Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute, “[Phobos and Deimos] are the most accessible planetary bodies in our solar system.” New Scientist has a report on the conference at Ames Research Center on Wednesday where ideas were thrown around for the human exploration of Mars. Astronauts could set foot on one of them within a decade. So cool.
Phobos and Deimos are similar in nature to C-type asteroids. Phobos is porous and has an extremely low orbit, subjecting it to tidal forces. These forces will eventually cause it to either break up or crash into Mars (in about 30-80 million years). In the meantime, it would make an excellent base of operations for a manned mission to Mars. Escaping the gravity of Phobos or Deimos would be much less difficult than escaping that of Mars.
One of the biggest problems with such a venture according to the New Scientist article is dust. With such a weak gravitational field, Phobos could have as much as 5 meters of dust accumulated on its surface. Also, a long journey like this would expose astronauts to too much radiation, giving them a 5% chance of dying of radiation poisoning (above the 3% NASA allows). But wouldn’t it be cool, to stand there on that dusty rock, a mere 6000 miles above Mars, looking at that giant red orb in the sky?
Phil Barthram recently announced on the ENGLISC mailing list a new Old English translator. For those unfamiliar with Old English, this is not the really cheap malt liquor. This is the grandmother of Modern English (by way of its mother, Middle English and a few others, chiefly Norman French). Whereas an Olde English (the malt liquor) translator might look like this:
“You look pretty.”
“I’m trashed on cheap swill.”
an Old English (Anglo-Saxon) translator looks more like:
Nu sculon herigean heofonrıces weard
Now we should praise the guardian of the kingdom of heaven
This is the first line of Cædmon’s Hymn. Check out the wikipedia page for Cædmon to read the whole nine lines.
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Sometimes I just open Pandora to find out the name of a song or artist I heard and want to buy from iTunes (or whatever). But then it automatically starts playing and it’s a really cool song and so I have to wait for the song to finish (since there’s no guarantee I’ll hear it again anytime soon). Then another good song comes on. And another. Soon enough, I forgot why I visited. Yeah, it’s a hard life.
Currently loving: Slumber Party: “Detroit femme doom rock with a late-night vibe.” I personally love the combination of 50’s rock harmonies, electronica and beautiful female vocals.
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Wired has taken notice of peak oil, so hopefully the word will start to spread and more and more people will realize we have a massive problem on our hands.
I’ve talked about peak oil before, but to recap it is the notion that at some point, the maximum amount of oil the world has to offer versus our consumption of it, will peak. Supply compared to demand was at its highest level last year, and never again will it be as high. From here on out, it’s a downward journey until there is no oil left. This is in part due to an increase in demand for oil throughout the world. As countries like China and India with massive populations continue to grow and add more cars to their streets, the demand for oil steadily increases. However, oil is a non-renewable resource so once we have exhausted all of it in the world, game over. So real supply is always decreasing (even though available supply may increase at times due to more refineries or pumps — this is temporary).
So you might at first think the road down to oil exhaustion will take a while, since it was practically a century climbing to the top of the hill. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Demand is ever-increasing, which means we will use the supplies up faster and faster. Also, intermittent outages will occur as supplies begin to fail. These shortages will mirror the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970’s. These crises will not just be a couple weeks of long lines, but will have a massive impact on the world economy. A few such crises and countries being cut off altogether will be catastrophic.
Every last thing we have in the west is based on oil. Farming. Plastics. Clothing. The blagoblag. Power production. Solar panels. Wind turbines. Nothing we have could be made without oil as it stands right now. When supplies begin to fail, we’ll see widespread repurcussions. It won’t be pretty.
I’ve been following the progress of Wonkosphere and talking about it for a while now [here, here, and here]. If you’re not familiar with Wonkosphere, it’s a website that tracks the buzz generated by candidates on political blogs. It reports buzz as a percentage of the total buzz by conservative, liberal, and independent bloggers. It also reports the tone of the posts, so you get more than just who is being talked about. So it appears that the buzz share is a predicter of national polling results According to Kevin Dooley of Wonkosphere, it’s not the total percentage of buzz share that is predictive of polling results, but the change in buzz share that predicts where national numbers are going. So are blogs affecting politics (as many have suggested) or are they just reflecting social trends?
Kucinich is doing fairly well today with buzz share, coming in at #3 among Democrats. He spiked a few days ago when his UFO comments incited a conservative love fest of crazy-elf-hippy remarks. Democracy for America held the 2008 Pulse Poll to gather data about people’s choice for who should be the 2008 Democratic contender. The results put Kucinich at a fairly decisive #1, beating out the phantom Al Gore (aka Newest Nobel Turd) and John Edwards. DFA consists primarily of Progressive Democrats, though, so you can’t generalize it to the population at large. However, these people tend to be rather vocal and active politically, so they may start to rub off. It’s a daunting task, though, counteracting the media brick-brain effect (i.e. making your brain into a gray brick).
Well, one more reason to dislike Obama, or at least his supporters, as well as this whole political system. Stephen Colbert was blocked from being put on the Democratic ticket in South Carolina last week. Turns out, the culprits were a group of Obama supporters. Inez Tenenbaum, the once superintendent of education in South Carolina (and failed Senatorial hopeful), is a vocal supporter of Obama. She pressured the gang of 16 members of the Democratic executive council to exclude him from the ticket. They acquiesced and voted 13-3 to block him.
What is wrong with this picture? For starters, 16 people decide the who gets to run and who doesn’t for president. This is one of the hidden daggers in the representative government model. The American Empire is about voting for one of several candidates the media has hand-picked and groomed to be president. Of course, this isn’t the media’s fault, they are only watching the money handed down to them and doing what good goons do. We don’t elect people who operate based on the consensus of the people who put them there. We elect people who then may do whatever they damn well please while making pretty noises. Not always even pretty noises (cf. W). So who votes for this elite cadre of people who make and break presidents before they are even on the ticket? I guarantee that more than 99% of the electorate doesn’t participate in this process.
Here is a rich line from Tenenbaum after she lobbied the executive council to get Colbert thrown off the ticket:
“I think lobbying was too strong a word. I called them to see what they were thinking, and if they had made up their mind. I am a volunteer in that campaign, and so I am not a staffer. And I thought it could have taken votes away from a lot of people.”
Logical problems aside, this is also a half-truth (what your mom referred to as a lie). The fact is, Obama supporters consist of a lot of young, college-educated voters. Young, college-educated voters watch Colbert. So by “a lot of people,” she meant to say “my master.”
I’m just so fed up with the Sheepocratic party for their high-talking hypocrisy. The so-called mandate that they completely rolled over on, showing that they are yellow-bellied toadies is just the start. There is dirty dealing everywhere I look.
There is a somewhat rare opportunity for people in the US and southern Canada over the next two days. The space shuttle Discovery just undocked from the International Space Station and is currently drifting just in front of it. It will be passing nearly overhead just before dawn, the best time for viewing. As the space station comes into the sunlight while the Earth below is still in darkness, the solar panels reflect the light and it stands out brighter than most stars in the sky. Both the ISS and Discovery will be visible to the naked eye. In fact, the ISS is four times brighter than the brightest star in the sky and about equal in brightness to the planet Jupiter.
To see when the space station will pass overhead, check out the NASA Skywatch website. You can also use the most excellent real-time satellite tracking website, n2yo.com. I mentioned this website before, and it continues to impress me. You can create prediction maps for up to 5 days in advance, showing exactly where it will pass near you. Tomorrow morning at 6:12am, Pittsburgh will have a very nice, nearly overhead view of the ISS and Discovery.
Discovery lands Wednesday around midday, so your chances for viewing are limited to Tuesday and Wednesday (Nov 6th & 7th).
So yesterday was the big race for the DARPA Urban Challenge. The goal is to research technologies that will lead to autonomous battlefield robots that can deliver supplies while navigating traffic. The joint Carnegie Mellon and General Motors team won, completing the race with no major traffic infractions. This strikes me as one of those technologies that in 20 years no one will realize had military origins. We’ll all happily get in our inexpensive robotic taxis running on electricity.
Japanese electronics use is perhaps a faulty bellwether for the American market. Whereas new gadgets are often available in Japan long before they make their appearance (if ever) in the US, there are also interesting cultural differences that don’t always translate popularity. There does seem to be a trend in the area of PC sales, however. An AP article today points out that PCs are taking a less important role in Japanese households with the emergence of smart phones, consoles that can reproduce many PC functions (web browsing, gaming, playing DVDs & music), and flat screen TVs (versus flat screen monitors, say). If you can check your email on your phone, listen to music on your iPod, download music on your Wii, and play games on your 52″ LCD, why would you want a computer in your home? Note: throughout this post I will use the term PC in the general sense of computer, rather than specifically as an IBM-compatible PC.
So this got me thinking about what a PC is good for and why I liked it back in the day (well, I still like it).
What I really want is a battlefield style game (such as Halo, Battlefield) but in a medieval/steampunk world. So weapons include slow-loading muskets, crossbows, swords, bows & arrows, daggers, clubs, etc. There would be stationary siege weapons like catapults, trebuchets and scorpions. For vehicles, there would be horses, possible fantasy creatures (but not dragons — too powerful), ships, and air ships (like zeppelins). And of course, this should be an MMOG. Now someone go build it.
And check out David Edwards’ site (image link above). Some really cool digital art, if you’re into it. Naturally the airship is my favorite, but Sky Castle, Versity, and 3001 AD are right up there.
Norse and Greek mythology have always interested me. I’ve also had a bit of an interest in Egyptian mythology, but never pursued it in depth. So finding a good resource that makes finding about mythologies from all over the world really makes my day. Godchecker.com has a whole slew of mythologies including Aztec, Incan, Mayan, Australian, Baltic, and the list goes on. Quite cool.
A lot of the information, especially for the lesser known gods/mythologies is light, but if you ever wanted to know who the God of Passion in Eastern European mythology was, look no further. Yarilo arrived on a white horse and ready for action. Plus the site incorporates a bit of humor into the posts. For example, from the post for Apollo:
“Sudden deaths are not uncommon when he is around — and don’t try to compete with him musically. It’s all very well to be played alive but not flayed alive like poor old Marsyas. Or to be given the ears of an ass like poor old King Midas. CASSANDRA never got another chance either, nor was he very pleasant to the SIBYL-OF-CUMAE, granting her immortality but leaving out the age clause.”
So, fun and informative. Good times.
Ever get pissed twice before you’ve really even opened your eyes? This is why I shouldn’t read my RSS feeds so early in the morning. At the top of the list is Bush equating Democrats who oppose the war (as if it could be called opposition, anyway) to those who ignored Hitler and Lenin and then Hillary firing back. Am I mad at Bush for making this analogy? No and I think he’s correct, but not in the way he thinks. I’m more angry at Hillary for firing back and not recognizing her own culpability. The Sheepocrats sat back and did nothing four years ago when this war began and passed the Patriot Act before that. They have endorsed the war at every stage since and even their current so-called opposition is luke-warm and putrid with its weasliness. So yeah, they are like people who ignored the rise of Hitler and Lenin. If she had recognized that and said it publicly, it would have done her credit.
Next up, I was reading a few bit twiddling hacks and came across a nice one for branchless absolute value [hat tip]. The hacks are all in the public domain, too, so that’s good. He does list the occasional variation that is patented, an enormously helpful fact if you’re producing commercial software. So here is the patented version of the branchless absolute value:
int v; // we want to find the absolute value of v
int r; // the result goes here
int const mask = v >> sizeof(int) * CHAR_BIT - 1;
r = (v ^ mask) - mask;
The last ^ (XOR) - (subtract) combination represents the patent. What works also?
r = (v + mask) ^ mask;
As Sean points out, though, the patent probably could be contested if the holder (none other than Sun Microsystems) ever tried to enforce it. So what ticked me off is that such a thing could be patented. I raise my hands in impotent fury at the ludicrousness of software patents. I don’t blame the inventors for them, it’s something you pretty much have to do these days. I blame the system that makes that true.
Update
Did some benchmarks on the two versions of absolute value given above. Using a 3.06GHz processor, I could run 4 billion absolute values in 18.916 +/- 0.021 seconds for the patented version and 18.906 +/- 0.026 seconds for the free version. So no need to even bother with the patented version it looks like.
Donna wasn’t feeling well today so I took the dogs to the dog park solo — a very rare act for me. Despite some initial social anxiety, it didn’t go badly. Autumn is really starting to kick in, though it hasn’t peaked yet. There are still plenty of green leaves on trees.
AKA Why it sucks to be born in Africa.
Life is hard if you’re not in the West. An article today in National Geographic talks about Death Maps, an excellent visualization of how certain types of death impact certain areas of the world. As everyone knows, AIDS is hitting Africa hard. That’s true for a wide range of preventable diseases as well. Largely, this is an issue of poverty and apathy. Modern Western Colonialism doesn’t take the form of troops of British redcoats marching through the jungle, but instead sprawling farms that drive down the price of food and use up land that local inhabitants can no longer use to produce food for themselves. Vast amounts of debt on top of this (thank you, World Bank) ensure that economies are depressed. The effect is easy to see, even if the media fails to see the Hand.
The top part of the map shows the deaths due to preventable diseases as a proportion of the population. The bottom map shows the proportion of the population to the land size. So India, which has a high density of people per square mile appears much larger than Canada and Australia, which have very low densities. The top map indicates that the larger a country is in comparison to its value in the bottom map, the more it suffers from deaths due to preventable disease. The AIDS map shows an even more disgustingly bloated African continent.
The only map where the West beats other countries is in lung cancer. This could be due to the larger number of chemicals we are exposed to or it could be an indication that we live long enough to be effected by it, while people in the rest of the world die to other, more expedient killers.
